[Every Autumn when
I begin constructing new Word Shops, my natural inclination
is to reconsider my summer reading, hoping to find
tidbits potentially interesting to the Coe community,
perhaps even useful to faculty enmeshed in our writing-across-the-curriculum
program. For this first issue of the 1995-96 school
year, I thought it appropriate to reproduce a conversation
I listened to this past June and July via the Internet. The discussion group involves mostly writing center
directors asking questions, seeking information, celebrating
promotions, exchanging chit-chat, and on occasion
exploring issues ranging from deciphering Derrida
to discussing what to do about apostrophes. While
I suppose everyone at Coe is anxious to know how Derrida's
stock is doing on the writing center stock exchange,
I decided it would be more entertaining--and perhaps
enlightening--to provide a sample of comments from
the apostrophe thread, which involved about 50 messages
over a three-week period. Since anyone giving writing
assignments will inevitably be faced with missing
and extraneous apostrophes, perhaps it's worth pondering
what we think of these little punctuation gnats. And,
inevitably, what we think of the apostrophe tells
us something about how we view many other conventions
of Standard English. As always, your comments and
responses are welcome. --Bob Marrs]

D.A.: Let me change from professor to prophetess: the apostrophe
as we know it is on the way out. After teaching for
years and years--and teaching the very smart for about
the last 10--it is going, gone, out. No one but us
cares--except the grammar police. The "kids"
have decided against its need, and only occasionally
in a fit of guilt use it's when they mean its. When
I throw an apostrophe tantrum they will sullenly put
some in for awhile, then...

S.K. : The apostrophe for possessives is also a mistake!
It's based on an Early modern English reinterpretation
of noun phrases with possessive of nouns ending in
s, z, ch, j like Mars's armor (pronounced
marzIz armor) as appositive constructions like Mars,
his armor, which could be pronounced without the
h (i.e. Mars (h)is armor). In other
words, the apostrophe is marking a lost h that
never was there in the first place. You get interesting
evidence for the reinterpretation from back spellings
like Mrs. Sands his maid.

J.W. : Dittos on funny dots. When a student starts to cloud
up and get frustrated about punctuation, I tell them,
"when in doubt, do without." I knew a kid
in high school who would put quotation marks around
something just to make it sparkle.

J.S. : I agree--it's on its way out. :) But not just by
kid fiat. Can you think of any examples where, were
the apostrophe gone, you couldn't figure out the meaning
anyway? It's a redundant marker in many ways.

If I rewrote the above
sentences without apostrophes, you might fidget because
you're used to their presences. But you would likely
understand the sentences in exactly the same way. It's and its don't occur in the same context. Neither
do your and you're. And the context is what reveals
the meaning. No need for the little "comma thing"
(as one of my students used to call it.) Notice the
past participle is also fading: iced tea is becoming
ice tea.

S.: Who declared
it "dead"? Is there going to be an autopsy? Gee, I'm not even willing to accept that it's on the
verge of extinction. I hadn't even considered putting
it on the endangered species list.

F.: The sort of ruleless rule of the comma splice, which
survives so hardily, makes me think the apostrophe
will live a long and happy life. I think it's a good
indicator, precise and neat. Perhaps the illiteracy
of store signs, which cannot distinguish between plurals
and possessives, indicates that s marker especially
as a plural will not survive after the apostrophe's
demise.

A.: If apostrophes could be changed to drips of water,
I am certain all the ones Faulkner dropped would create
quite a havoc on the Mississippi right now. Still,
most of us (I assume) enjoy his stories, and I don't
recall problems adapting to apostrophes' absence in
any of his novels.

E.L.: I'm afraid I have to join with those who see the end
of the apostrophe in the near future. I also wonder
if comma splices will stop being an error soon. I
guess I have this evolutionary view of grammar: any
form that serves a purpose will prosper but those
that don't will die out. So, if I am a prophet, I
think we will see the end of "which" "whom"
(which already has a society devoted to Whom's doom)
and see the growth of the construction " the
<singular noun> . . . they." I kind of
like the unruliness of language.

C.B.: I doubt that any of us will see the demise of the
apostrophe or relative pronouns--language changes
at a much slower pace than humans live. Jeanne mentioned
redundancy as a reason for this predicted demise. But isn't redundancy one of the things we value in
our language? In all languages? Patterns in poetry? Transitions in prose (intros and conclusions)? Parallel
construction? Cadence? Isn't redundancy what makes
it possible to have infinite linguistic variety in a
finite system?

J.: I know I will
find myself deep in linguistic water momentarily and
have to swim for my life. I agree that redundancy
is a feature of the language and that it provides
richness. But the apostrophe mark is solely a function
of print. It does not exist in spoken language. And
for that reason I think it and other markers like
commas are always going to be fluid and subject to
abandonment in ways that words and syntactical structures
never will be.

S.: I guess one man's 'unruliness' is another's slovenliness.

E.C.: Language changes slowly? I wonder if you'd be willing
to qualify that statement, Cliff? Otherwise, you
& I have a chasmic gap in our understanding of
the nature of language.

Seems to me language is changing continuously, even as
we type! New words sprout like mushrooms, old words
fade away and blink out as usage declines and only
dictionaries remember, verbs get nounified/nouns verbified,
what's grammatical in an academic journal is different
from what's grammatical on the streets of St. Louis,
what's acceptable in an academic journal today is
different from what was acceptable 10 years ago. A
tv commercial comes up with a snappy phrase and quite
suddenly people everywhere are saying it.

Language is like a moiling, broiling, bubbling brew--always
moving, writhing, splashing and leaping. Stability
is a reassuring myth. When and where does language
change slowly.

"The right map is the one that tells you the lies
you need to know."--O.B. Hardison

C. : I agree
that certain print markers aren't present in spoken
language (indents, page numbers, spacing, etc.) though
I'm interested in learning to speak in 14 point Helvetica
with bold, underline, and italic option. I think
this was Derrida's philosophical point--he difference/differance
thing. But I'm not sure that the non-presence of
certain markers in speech convinces me that these
features are more subject to change and perhaps even
extinction. I'd actually argue that written language
(and all its markers) has a permanence that belies
its mutability. I mean, beyond writing's concrete
manifestation (black marks on a page), written language
guides (and perhaps determines) so much of what we
do (instruction manuals, laws, contracts, etc.). Because writing carries such weight, I suspect these
markers we're talking about are more permanent than
we imagine.

What grammatical claptrap exists in spoken language? We "breathe" when we speak. Much of punctuation
reflects that breathing. To stop using punctuation
because it doesn't appear in spoken language would
make about as much sense as to stop breathing when we
talk because breathing doesn't appear in written
communication.

I'm VERY uncomfortable taking this conservative stance
about punctuation but I find myself even more uncomfortable
with the prospect of written language sans punctuation. A compromise might serve us here. How about grammatical
conventions that can be ignored (after all, that
seems to be the case at present)? However, at least
with the conventions in place some of us can look
down on our less learned neighbors who can't or won't
use them. Some of us can still "pass judgment"
on folk who appear ignorant of the conventions--much
like when someone showers too infrequently or belches
at the dinner table. For me it's a matter of
propriety.

J.W.: I love
this stuff. And it is such a continual frustration. If "correctness" of usage is squirming
away with every evolutionary step in the development
of this language, then dictionaries are obsolete as
of the day the last notecard is filled out by a lexicographer. Are "usage" authorities likewise obsolete
the day they decide to dig in their heels and not
go with the flow? My non-English colleagues sometimes
look to me (and other Englishers) as the last ditch
stand against language corruption, as though they
want us to be L'Academie Francaise. We can wink and
smirk amongst ourselves, knowing that emperor is butt-naked. But our institutions, to some degree, like to keep
us around for just that reason, ill-informed though
it may be.

I'm recalling the line by Harvey Kormann's Hedley Lamar
in "Blazing Saddles": WE'VE GOT TO PROTECT
OUR PHONEY-BOLONEY JOBS! If I teach my students enough
"correct" usage to keep from sounding goofy
or confused, isn't there always some weenie out there
who purports to know my job better than I do and uses
some BS apostrophe rule to oppress me, by accusing
me of incompetence for letting too much slide by uncorrected?

____________

I'm not really interested in throwing huge coils of barbed
wire around the apostrophe and defending it Rambo-style.

C:: I'm an
advocate of the subject redundancies for a more practical reason‑‑I'm afraid of the semantic latitude
that not using what markers we have allows the reader
(read: I'm an anal retentive control type and have
delusions that I can actually get readers to understand
things in the same way I do). I guess I'm either
ungenerous in my imagining an audience (they're lazy
and will resent being made to dig for hidden treasure,
as it were) or respectful (they're busy and their
time is valuable and I shouldn't consciously conceal
meaning‑‑it's disrespectful).

B.S. (Illinois
Wesleyan]:

But I thynk wee sould

agre

that form

has

some

significance in red ibulitee spelling

for example was regularized
when printing presses began to make "literature"

available to the masses
This was a simplification of form that while it may
not

have improved readability for everybody certainly

improved re adability for most

In the graphic arts and publishing industry readibility

and form

are studied

as both an art

and as a science

Anyone who has done historical research will tell you
that deciphering old documents can be a royal pain
because of idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation. Form creates meaning and is indeed a part of the sense
that is made. We might speculate that the regularization
of form (whether in spelling, sentence structure,
spacing, or layout) came with the huge increases in
population, cities, and industrialization that required
greater communication and coordination. Or perhaps
the better communication permitted the development
of cities and industrialization.

Does the death of the apostrophe signal a cultural shift? If so, to what? What does it mean at the deepest
level of knowledge structure-at the level of our grammar-if
marking possession (as opposed to the plural) and
marking missing elements drops out of cultural significance? I doubt that it means we've become a culture in which
private property is no longer important, although
it may mean the opposite--that ownership is so basic
to being that it disappears because it doesn't need
to be marked. If you will forgive a feminist comparison,
it is rather like the patriarchal assumption of the
male as norm (that which ultimately made Freud's penis-envy
theory look so self-blind and foolish).

If possessives and plurals are undifferentiated and if
missing elements are unacknowledged, we have what
is only superficially a simplification of language. Instead we may have at the deepest level (the level
we're normally unaware of) a construction of reality
that denies difference, obscures origin, and perhaps
even denies individuality (in the most literal and
least subjective sense).

In what Wittgenstein calls "the language game,"
form (in terms of grammar, punctuation, common phrasing,
dialect, and other specifics of a particular discourse)
generates a reader's faith in his or her ability to
interpret a text. The writer has the same faith. The reader and the writer may have misplaced their
faith, or, in religious terms, they may belong to
different sects or believe in different gods. But
if they share experience in a discourse, if the reader
and the writer go to the same church, participate
in the same sacraments, and subscribe to the same
theology, then they are more likely to have the faith
that supports the fact in text and interpretation.

Readability depends not only on commonly used forms,
it also depends on the reader having practiced a certain
amount of "fake 'til you make it" ritual. An apostrophe gives a reader a fact as well as ordinary
"I know" faith. How many facts of communication
(like the apostrophe) can we remove before we also
corrupt faith?

We have put together a sort of Rosetta Stone that allows
us to communicate across huge linguistic barriers. By teaching language to our children as a legitimate
subject of study, we have created a Rosetta Stone
between common communication and the private symbology
in our brains. Losing the apostrophe may be only
a tiny chip out of the translation stone. But have
we considered just how brittle that stone might be?

J.S.: When
I say I think apostrophes will fade away, I do not
mean I have any intention of contributing to the process. When I teach writing, I don't just toss out any requirement
of attention to matters such as commas, apostrophes
or even who/whom. But, as I have said before, I also
don't waste the time of my students teaching them
that such things are "school marm" conventions
they can safely ignore, because, as Mike accurately
points out, no, by God, they can't. Nor do I waste
their time by pretending these are THE rules and anybody
who doesn't abide by them is obviously a communist
sympathizer or worse. Rather, they exist and should
be taught in a rhetorical context--with the reader
and message firmly in mind. And am I revealing my
affection for old-fashioned classical rhetoric here?
Yup.

E.L.: Aha,
you've found me out. My dislike of apostrophes is
really part of my desire to deny individuality, a
drive that, if nothing else, makes me feel very much
like a "unique" individual at least on this
list. But I'm afraid that all this was somewhat below
my conscious mind since what I had in mind was the
idea that apostrophes are redundant. Think about to,
two, and too in speech. Does anybody ever feel confused
by the fact that they all sound the same? Not very
much I would say. Of course we can make up examples
in which they can be confused, but in actual speech
people tend to avoid those.

But the real reason I think apostrophes will disappear
is tied to my belief in democracy. Simply speaking,
the fact is that they are disappearing and there is
nothing we can do about it. The story of the Dutch
boy putting his finger in the dike is a lovely story,
but I'm afraid that in this case he, or she, will
simply drown.

J.S.: Not
exactly the Apostrophe to an Apostrophe I had intended
to write but...

Much have I traveled into realms of writing

And much goodly punctuation seen.

Round many little marks have I been where bards in fealty
to Thistlebottom hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Grammar ruled as its demesne.

Yet never did I breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Harbrace speak out loud and bold:

Then I felt like some watcher in cyberspace

When a new webpage swims into his ken.

Or like stout Cortez...

--with abject apologies to John Keats

E.C.: I wonder
if it's because the mutability of language--sometimes
in the form of our ability to cast off those little
chips like apostrophes without crashing the whole
structure--is *not* something provoked from without
but is an essential function of language perpetrated
by language users. Us. We can continue to communicate
in spite of spikes of change because we're changing
too. Language is not something that happens outside
our skins, not something we pick up and use. We are
it. It are us.

I think 'brittle' aptly describes the codified language,
the language of dictionaries and handbooks, not living
languages that ride the breath of living bodies and
ripple across pages and glow from screens.

Losing the apostrophe might create a crack in a lot of
handbooks that are written with confidence in its
eternal niche, but I'd hate to think we conflate handbook
English with the language we speak and write.

M.S. [SUNY
Binghamton]: i have noticed that this apostrophe
debate has, as its target, not a little inverted floating
comma, but a host of competing ideologies. Some have
argued that the apostrophe will disappear, and good
riddance. However, some have been troubled by its
imminent demise. Still others are trying to stake
their claims that it will not disappear. To my amazement,
there are a number of other positions as well. Each
originally left me thinking, "well, so WHAT?" but each *is* important.

Interestingly I began to see, if not "sides"
develop in argument, there was a certain "continuum"
which people placed themselves along. "I believe"
became a central part of responses, which brings up
faith--which is a discussion from another list . .
.

I return now to the metaphor of cracks and fissures. it has been used throughout this debate, and I began
these musings with it. From cultural geography, I
borrow the idea of a dynamic border. Here, I think,
is the interesting part. Through the history of English
(language) study, the border seems to shift periodically
from conservative to progressive ideas of language
(a gross simplification, I know, but embodied in the
pendulum comments) and yet both seem to survive.

As living users of language, we each contribute to preservation
*and* change. I don't know *where* things will change,
as I don't know where things will *not* change. Who/whom
and the apostrophe' seem to be particularly contestable
sites, and while my gut reaction is that conservation
in these cases is quixotic, I have no attachment to
either form.

What I'm getting at is mundane. Rather than making new
knowledge for the field, arguments such as this define
the borders, cracks, and fissures in the field that
is (was?) called English, yet even that title seems
to be changing, as the cultural studies thread testifies. Any living dynamic entity has such borders, cultural,
political, economic, and even the planet, through
its tectonic plates, shows its mutability. We shift
and change. I guess I've enjoyed watching the phenomenon
in action more than I would have enjoyed participation.

I think we are placing bets on the unknowable outcome
of inevitable change. And to further what Eric mentioned
above, I accept that change *defines* a healthy arena,
although I am not hubristic enough to select what
or how change will occur. place your bets!

D.H.:

Hail to thee, blithe 'postrophe!

Mere floating comma thou never wert,

That 'twixt the "do not" n and t

Squeezest thy very heart

In profuse strains of substitutionary art.

Higher still and higher

From the page thou springest,

Nor dost thou tire

As the superscript thou wingest,

And into the contractive breach thy very self thou flingest.

In the ghostly glowing

Of computer screen,

On which lines are slowly growing,

Thy presence bright and keen

Makes possession not just heard, but seen.

B.S.: I fear
the disappearance of the apostrophe (if it does disappear)
because I figure humanity has trouble enough communicating
without losing even one tiny elucidator. However,
I'm not really interested in throwing huge coils of
barbed wire around the apostrophe and defending it
Rambo-style. And I've never been much interested
in seeing grammar handbooks cast in stone. I break
plenty of the rules myself (most of them consciously,
but not always).

I also know that tradition and what seems "right"
to a society of language users will not cave-in simply
because herds of 19-year-olds don't know an apostrophe
from their posteriors. All I can do is teach the
value of the apostrophe as an effective clarifier
of communication --until it dies or returns to health
as robust as the rest of the language.

L.C.: Last
night, in an attempt to make my life interesting to
my 22-year daughter, an anthropology major, I first
summarized and then displayed the thread on apostrophes
to her. She appreciates them in a way that had not
occurred to me. She likes them as symbols of transcription
that communicate an important (and perhaps universal)
cultural concept, that of ownership or close association. Such symbols, she says, will be important to those
who dig up our artifacts. The two ways we use apostrophes
may blur the picture a little, but surely future anthropologists
will be able to figure out a fairly consistent system
of transcription of the meaning of spoken language.

If, she says, folks can't count on us to preserve this
elegant method, what good are college English professors? Surely we can do our basic job and preserve the thoughts
of this century with key markers that can guide those
who dig up our artifacts to an understanding of our
written word. If we give up insisting on such markers,
we give up our (very remote) future.

She goes on that newspapers, even when they discuss the
glorious victories of the Houston Rockets, and news
magazines and trash magazines and rock magazines and
Latino magazines written in English and African American
publications and . . . . (on and on and on) are fairly
accurate in their transcription of the possessive
apostrophe. Why should the culturally elite give
up on it? The priorities of English professors remain
a mystery to her. Is it perhaps that English professors
don't know how to teach a simple but important concept
like the apostrophe? Sure, they can speculate about
where it came from, but teach it as a method of transcribing
meaning? Perhaps they're not up to it.

N.L.: That
was a great story about your daughter. It made me
think of this whole apostrophe thing in the usual
binary way. Some say the role of schooling is to
transmit and preserve culture. Others say it is to
transform culture. I suppose your daughter is in
the first camp. However, like most binaries I see
value in both options.

I believe this frame also applies to the academic freedom
discussion. The power to transmit or transform culture
is often what academic freedom *should* be about. However, if academic freedom is ensured only to the
tenured and if we rely more and more on non-tenured
faculty to staff our courses, such power is vested
in only an elite. But then again that might describe
our political, economic, and academic systems more
accurately than anything.

E.C: Thanks
for posting your daughter's response to our apostrophic
ramblings. Her perspective is interesting, and the
point about us English teacher types paying attention
to the wider world is well taken. That message fits
in well, I think, with the point

I've been trying to push here: If the wider world (even
the wider academic world) loses interest in the apostrophe,
it will fade away and attempts at resuscitation would
be futile; if the world continues to find it useful,
it will survive and attempts to kill it will be futile.

It's also interesting
(and exasperating) to hear that your daughter would
have us be the curators of language, as if it was
a fragile thing that had to be protected from degradation.
I don't see that as being our jobs, but I know that
many people would foist that role upon us.

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